Phil PowisChief Wisdom Keeper @ Sacred Business Flow

The 10 Core Fears Exercise #substack #shorts

12 May 2026 · 1 min

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1:20

In this short coaching segment, the speaker addresses the common problem of creative stagnation and the search for one's artistic voice. They argue that many people default to external solutions—courses, time‑management tricks, or technique‑focused systems—while neglecting the deeper inner work needed to uncover what truly blocks creativity. The speaker emphasizes the importance of exploring one's essence and identifying internal obstacles. As a practical tool, they introduce an exercise they use with clients: creating a list of ten core fears related to creativity and, for each fear, pinpointing the protective behavior that arises. By surfacing these fears and associated defenses, clients often gain immediate insight into the hidden patterns that hold them back, enabling a more authentic, inside‑out creative process.

Chapters

problem of not being able to create. How do we find our voice? That kind of thing. And often, so often, people will go to strategies and systems and the resources and that kind of stuff rather than the more inner work that we've just talked about with the essence and looking at kind of what gets in the way. That to kind of go deep in that way actually supports the process sort of from the inside out. And I think that's, there's a lot of, in the kind of creativity space, I think it's not often given as much attention as it needs. You know, there's like a kind of do this course or do this time management course. It must be about time or it must be about, you know, the techniques that I don't have. And so I feel like that is, yeah, something that is helpful to know is like actually if you are down to do the deep work and really look at yourself and, you know, the first thing I always do with clients is get them to make a list of their 10 core fears around creativity. And it's really challenging thing to do, but to look at those and look at for each fear, a corresponding kind of protective behavior that goes with it. And it's incredible how people already begin to see, oh, that's what holds me back. Oh, that's how I see myself. So I think, I guess,